String the Neighborhoods / bridge the Gap
Two Probes : Library-Place / Market-Place
Library-Place (Perspective)
Market / Library (Perspective / Section)
Market / Library (Perspective / Section)
Programmatic Response/ Strategy
# Downtown Brooklyn is fragmented by its infrastructure, diverse uses, cultural and income differences. The breaks define a big triangle, an island, an isolated hole bounded by Adams Street, Flatbush Avenue, and Willoughby Street. In addition, Metrotech and colleges in this triangle are a new civic center, a power center, an information center, that fragment and is disconnected from the surrounding, urban spaces, and neighborhoods.
# My programmatic response/ strategy is to define, and create a sub-system of streets, urban spaces, new layers, new elements.... to re-structure, link and string the neighborhoods of Downtown Brooklyn together.
Two Probes
# Two probes explore stringing neighborhoods together: one is in the area crossing Flatbush Avenue, another in the area crossing the junction of Brooklyn/ Queens Expressway.
# One probe is a "library-place", another is a "market-place". The library-place is dispersed through the whole area creating many new sections and layers of public activities. The market-place is collected beneath the Highway becoming a center of urban community.
# The first area contains residential areas, schools( colleges), a park, a church....It is fragmented not only by the big scale of Flatbush Avenue and Tillary St., but also by the walled campus, gated community and urban spaces....
# The second area contains low-income residential areas, retail stores, and a park....It is also fragmented by the big traffic structure, walled community and parks....
# The first probe is in the triangular area. It has a higher standard of living, it is more central and metropolitan, it is more connected to centers of knowledge, information, power...., it shares the convenience of big streets and is fragmented by them.
# The other is a low-income area, more local, more controlled....It is beneath the Highway( not sharing its convenience) .
# My strategy in these two probes is first to re-define the urban vacumn, and then to create new pieces laid out in another sequence.
In the first probe the pieces are libraries, and in another probe are markets.
The new pieces and layers, dispersed and gathered in different ways, create and strengthen the urban space of Downtown Brooklyn.